Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires

Re:Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires by antpls on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:07AM (#20667203)

Maybe they are investing in user habits, branding and data, such as : where are the consumers, where are the most wanted food, how frequent is it, at what time, etc. $544m are invested to grow the data machine.

Uber uses the current fleet for now, but once they have more data to analyze, they can switch to a better operational model which would be hopefully profitable.

What is worrying is the aggressive, anti-competitive, potentially illegal (depending on the country) subsidiaries aimed at killing the local competition.

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Re:Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires by navigatesol on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:33AM (#20667661)

>they can switch to a better operational model which would be hopefully profitable.

So they have been burning billions of dollars in the hopes that there might be a business model in the future?

Maybe it's just that VCs were naive to think that taxis and food delivery were good businesses.

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Re:Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires by antpls on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:05PM (#20670506)

Your sentence seems to insist on "billions", but it's not that much in regard to all the invested money in the world. According to UNESCO (http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-devel...), the world's spending on R&D (only) is estimated to be $1.7 trillions. Apple's R&D investment for 3rd quarter of 2019 is $4.2 billions. So, yes, billions are burned in the hope of finding things. Most probably, future generations will even burn hundred of trillions.

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Re:Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires by freyr on Sunday August 11, 2019 @09:39PM (#20671767)

Thanks, I'll try that brilliant logic on my wife.

"Sure, hun, the Porsche was expensive, but it's not that much in regard to all the money spent in the world!"

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